On the morning of October 7, 2025, Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS), quietly slipped into crisis.
Inside the Ministry of Trade, a sealed letter carried a single instruction to the Bureau’s Executive Director, James Kasigwa: step aside.
The directive, couched as administrative, not disciplinary, ordered him to take 30 working days of ‘annual leave’ starting October 15, while the National Standards Council investigates allegations of insubordination, misconduct, impropriety, mismanagement, and corruption.
He was told to hand over to Deputy Executive Director (Standards), Patricia Bageine Ejalu, with the Council chair, James Kalibbala, personally witnessing the transition.
The handover memo tried to sound routine, almost bureaucratic. But behind the paperwork lay weeks of tension, sealed memos, and whispered accusations that had turned the Bureau into a pressure cooker.
The crisis before the crisis
The trouble didn’t begin in October. It began on August 26, when the Ministry of Trade fired off a memo to UNBS warning of what it called a ‘systematic corruption crisis’ under Kasigwa’s leadership.
The language was stark: UNBS, it said, had become ‘a clear and present danger to public safety and economic security’.
The ministry accused Kasigwa of presiding over an organised scheme that had turned the standards agency into a personal fiefdom. It listed six explosive categories of wrongdoing.
There were public safety failures – used cars entering the country without radiation or emissions inspection, procurement irregularities, and sabotage of government’s digital tax stamps programme, the system designed to track excisable goods and protect revenue, by derailing the official contract with SICPA and attempting to set up a rival system with a private partner.
Other accusations included economic sabotage, with the Ministry citing cancellation of a national weighing-scale verification contract, exposing traders and farmers to faulty equipment, opening unauthorised accounts, reallocating 40 percent of the agency’s budget without approval, and funding foreign trips for MPs in violation of finance rules.
He was also accused of purging senior officers, whose names have been omitted from this story, for resisting irregular directives, in addition to benefiting from a ‘fundamentally flawed’ appointment that bypassed proper recruitment processes.
What the ministry painted wasn’t a simple case of administrative friction; it was a portrait of institutional capture.
Thus, on September 3, Trade Minister Francis Mwebesa escalated the matter in a letter to the newly inaugurated 10th National Standards Council, in which he invoked the UNBS Act and ordered an urgent investigation into Kasigwa’s conduct.
His directive turned whispers into statute, citing five pillars of alleged wrongdoing, among which included defying policy, botching pre-export verification of conformity contracts, sabotaging digital conformity systems, neglecting scale verification, and violating the Public Finance Management Act.
Billions of shillings, he warned, were at risk, but still, Mwebesa noted that it was prudent that the Council accords ‘Kasigwa an opportunity to respond to the allegations’.
The summons
A week later, on September 10, the National Standards Council acted, with Kalibbala sending Kasigwa a formal summons to appear before the Council on September 16.
The tone was polite but firm; cooperation would ‘greatly assist’ the inquiry, and attached was Mwebesa’s September 3 directive, ensuring the Council’s work rested on legal ground.
And for Kasigwa, the summons was the beginning of an official shift from rumour to record.
By early October, the writing was on the wall. The Ministry, eager to protect documents and limit interference, decided Kasigwa needed to go on leave.
On October 7, the Trade Ministry ordered him to proceed on leave effective October 15.
Officially, it was ‘annual leave.’ Unofficially, it was containment, a way to keep the inquiry clean, the evidence secure, and the Bureau steady while the Council dug in.
The move came with a promise that the Council would complete its work quickly and report back to the minister.
For now, the National Standards Council holds the script. Its findings will decide whether Kasigwa’s troubles end with a quiet return or spiral.
Either way, UNBS returns to the routine it has come to be known for – scandal after scandal – while the pile of substandard goods continues to grow, which the Bureau’s own report puts at 54 percent.
Yesterday, Kalibbala said the executive director’s leave was overdue, and it was agreed that he would step aside for 30 days to allow the investigation to take place.
‘The next step would be for the executive director to respond to the allegations, and then for the board to invite relevant staff members to provide information and testimony. A lot of issues of concern happened during the nine months when the board wasn’t in place,’ he said.